On Wednesday, the boys ran the North Johnson river, about an hour south of Cairns. Up before light, in the car at 6am and after a quick stop at Maccas, I left them facing the hour and a half walk in at 9am. I had 6 hours to kill before I could expect them at the get out. Easy - I'm surrounded by National Parks, I'll take a walk.
There's something about backpacks that makes me feel really adventurous. Even though mine was far from being filled with sensible things (lavash breads, salsa, smoked mackerel, swimmers and a camera) I nevertheless felt energised with some girl guide spirit as I set of into the rainforest.
I'm going to assume that you, like me, think rainforests look like this:
I now know that this is not the case. The rainforest is dark and wild and Walt Disney was clearly misinformed when he produced Fern Gully.
A tickley-itch at my ankle soon alerted me to a leach. I grabbed at it, pulled it, and it just stretched whilst its face remained at my skin, sucking my blood. After a second, more panicky grab my oldest-sister-of-two-brothers instinct kicked in and I flicked the bastard off me with a killer, well-aimed finger nail that has been known to near produce tears when applied to sibling ears. Bam. Leach terminated.
On the bright side, I thought, I'll be able to tell the boys I had a leach episode. That'll impress them.
This was, however, a walk that covered many, many waterfalls. My leach adventures turned into an ongoing saga and my flicks became incredibly accurate and deadly strong.
Believe it or not, there were enough distractions along the walk that the leaches did not ruin my afternoon.
At one stage, I found a 1.5m long snake skin across the path left all ghostly and wrinkly and strangely appealing. After letting my inner child prod at it with sticks, I continued on my journey revived by the discovery. Only to nearly tread on a very much alive and hissing black snake. This one was maybe only a metre long, but something inherent and ancient in my brain realised very quickly that I was most definitely well within striking distance. I have never stopped so fast in my life. Within two seconds it had slithered speedily off the path, all the while keeping its beady eyes and hissy tongue pointed right at me.
We are not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
I stopped shortly after for another leach bashing sessions. Flick-bam, flick-bam. Four in one go from one stream crossing. After congratulating myself on my improved leach-flicking efficiency, I started off again with what I have to say was a bit of a British this-rainforest-shan't-get-the-better-of-me pace.
Only to walk into a spider web.
Step back. Scratch web off. Yurgh. Do it faster because this is one sticky-ass web. Ergh. Is anything crawling on me? No. Don't open your eyes yet, way too much web for that. Ewww. Anything crawling? No. Finally open my eyes.
Above the Heather-sized hole in the web is this Golden Orb spider:
I won't say it was the size of my hand because that would be lying. But it was bloody close to the size of my hand.
For the next 20 minutes I walked scanning the path in the distance for snakes and then scanning the closer head height view for spiders. After a while my precautionary measures just made me dizzy.
I was pretty jumpy for the rest of the walk. My only comforting thought was that at least in Australia there are no tigers or bears to jump out at you and I could ignore the rustling either side of me.
Near the end of my journey, however, I spotted this track:
I don't care that Emus aren't carnivorous - anything with feet the same size as mine is something I do not want to meet on a semi-dark path in the rainforest. And why do they live in the rainforest anyhow!?
When I finally got to the end and drove to the get out, tired and full of stories, I waited for the boys at the top of the walk out.
The first thing they had to say to me?
'Ben nearly got eaten my a crocodile!'
Well, that trumps my story.
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